World Collision - The Ninth - Part 2
Biin could not fully grasp the intricacies of Mitomok's world. After all, the man wasn't the type to run around spilling details about his own territory.
The single piece of information Biin possessed was that Mitomok had designated the Great Firmament as his first no-man's-land. That was the entire reason he had chosen to challenge him.
In that sense, there was one clear disadvantage and one distinct advantage.
The disadvantage was that while Mitomok's world enjoyed material abundance, it was truly scraping the bottom in terms of spirit flow.
Biin had never once worried about mana depletion, yet Mitomok had no concerns about food whatsoever. His only anxiety was military weakness caused by a chronic shortage of mystery. He had managed to overcome the deficit with a few unique terrains, but it still wasn't enough. That was why he had selected the Great Firmament—to compensate for his weakness.
In other words, even if Biin defeated him, the supply of flow from the world probably wouldn't differ by much.
The advantage was that Mitomok's world was, in the most infuriating way possible, a perfect swamp-lake-jungle civilization. The terrain was ideal for the gumtoads to run wild.
It looked like a landscape literally begging amphibians to thrive. Biin abandoned every monster he had originally planned to deploy in the first collision and flooded the enemy world with nothing but gumtoad tadpoles.
To Mitomok, who had linked every corner of his realm with rivers and built an extensive water-transportation network, it was bitterly unfair. Every single settlement had at least one reservoir, wetland, lake, or river in its vicinity. The gumtoads reproduced at an absolutely insane rate.
Of course, even that wasn't enough to topple Mitomok's sturdy civilization. The creatures weren't destructive or powerful enough to qualify as true weapons of annihilation.
But they could drive his people completely insane.
CROOOOOOAAAK!!!
“Huuuurgh!”
The sudden nighttime artillery blast sent Mitomok’s people kicking off their beds in panic.
“Aaaaaaaaagh! Oh God! Please do something about that thing! I’m seriously going to lose my mind!!!”
They wept and wailed, offering frantic prayers to Mitomok. Because of that cursed “scream,” they had been robbed of sleep for over twenty days straight.
The toads croaked at night and croaked during the day. If they simply chattered nonstop it might have been bearable, but these monsters stayed perfectly silent for long stretches before suddenly unleashing a CROOOOOOAAAK!!! that made hearts seize in terror.
Mitomok had no effective counter. To be honest, neither did his soldiers.
“Head toward the sound!”
“What the hell even is this insane creature?!”
“Is the enemy god a psychopath? Why would anyone raise something like that?!”
The one useful discovery was that the sound traveled in a perfectly straight line. A normal croak could never reach 180 decibels. The creature somehow compressed the sound’s natural expansion into a linear blast. The only silver lining was that if you followed the direction of the scream, you would eventually find the damn toad.
“Kill it! There are probably three or four more nearby!”
“Wait—there it is.”
“Hiiiiik! Everyone down!”
CROOOOOOAAAK!!!
Those who dropped flat survived. The soldier who failed to react in time took the full shockwave. His eardrums burst, his internal organs and blood vessels ruptured, and he died on the spot.
Gulp.
“Kill it!”
After a single croak, the creature couldn’t scream again for three days. Aside from that monstrous roar, it was nothing more than a large, sluggish sandbag. A well-placed military slingshot round could kill it instantly—though its body was admittedly quite tough.
This was the Loud Gumtoad, the most vicious specimen among all the gumtoads Biin had created. When mana was scarce and they remained small, males and females alike simply croaked to find mates like ordinary toads. But when mana was abundant, females grew hard and silent while males swelled to enormous size, ballooning until they reached a full four meters in diameter.
To produce such deafening sounds, the males had sacrificed most bodily functions. They could not move. They simply sat in place, bellowing at maximum volume to lure in the silent, egg-laden females.
Large, slow prey was difficult to catch, so they supplemented their diet by devouring any creatures that had collapsed in terror from the nearby screams.
Even Biin, their creator, had never expected this evolutionary path. He certainly hadn’t anticipated how devastatingly effective it would prove.
CROOOOOOAAAK!!!
When one of them wandered near a village and unleashed its cry, entire floating houses collapsed. The shockwave came from pure acoustic pressure.
People in the immediate vicinity fainted or died of heart attacks. Those even a kilometer away still suffered ruptured eardrums.
It wasn’t strange at all.
At 120 decibels, sound already caused pain. At 140, permanent hearing damage began.
And the decibel scale was logarithmic—every ten decibels represented a tenfold increase in intensity.
A 180-decibel scream from the Loud Gumtoad was ten thousand times more powerful than the threshold of ear destruction. It was nothing short of a living catastrophe.
“Oh God!!!”
The panic was enough to make anyone cry out to the divine.
Meanwhile Biin was having the time of his life, continuously creating new subspecies of Loud Gumtoads. One-eighty decibels was honestly excessive and took far too long to reach maturity.
It was far more efficient to have them croak hundreds of times at 150 decibels. Or thousands of times at 140. Honestly, even several thousand ordinary frogs croaking at 100 decibels in the wetlands would have been enough to rob the enemy population of sleep.
Mitomok had never imagined that infinite noise pollution could torment him this badly.
“This seems like such a trivial tactic, yet the effect is horrifying…”
If a physical super-monster had invaded, the response might have been simpler.
Mitomok’s army was not weak. Thousands of slingshot troops could turn tens of thousands of enemies into pincushions. The previous player he had faced had brought flying, fire-breathing behemoths, yet Mitomok’s legendary slingshot soldiers had shot them out of the sky.
But this—this relentless, world-spanning barrage of noise—left no room for countermeasures.
The creatures’ reproductive rate was monstrous. And the screamers were only the beginning. There were gumtoads that sprayed filth when approached, venomous ones, gigantic ones that devoured people whole, and others that projected nauseating hallucinations. The ecosystem was packed with every variety of abomination.
“Did he know my civilization was swamp-jungle based and raise these things on purpose?”
No. He hadn’t known. It was pure, ridiculous luck. Biin, who usually suffered terrible matchup luck and only encountered competent opponents, had finally drawn a battlefield perfectly suited to his forces.
Had the enemy been a dry highland civilization, the gumtoads would have struggled. But every settlement relied on water channels, and both villages and cities were built around wetlands. The frog strategy had succeeded beyond all expectation.
Yet Mitomok was not so fragile that he would fall to mere annoyance. He too was a top-tier player. While he lacked mythic-grade traits, he possessed two legendary ones.
The Purpose of Creation Is the Completion of Life
When using Life Creation, you can now manifest the lifeform most perfectly suited to the desired function. Any natural property may be granted. The creature will integrate flawlessly with the ecosystem and continue evolving in that direction.
It was not a mythic trait that broke the rules, but a legendary one that produced permanent, optimal change within them. And it was incredibly potent.
Creatures produced by Life Creation were usually crude or refined depending on the user’s skill. This trait guaranteed the highest possible completion from the very first attempt.
Mitomok had originally chosen it to create ideal livestock and perfect crop strains for his civilization. Now he used it for war.
Consuming his divinity, he created snakes that would exterminate the gumtoads.
Since these creatures had never existed in his world before—nor in the one from his previous life—Mitomok had been momentarily flustered. But he soon realized the legless, agile predators hunted the damned amphibians with terrifying efficiency. They were also remarkably friendly toward his own people and proved to be powerful hunters. He naturally incorporated them into his combat forces.
“Even if the slingshots can’t kill the enemy, that’s fine. They’ll track the scent of blood. If you coat them with something like perfume instead, they’ll follow the trail even more eagerly.”
“We simply release them and they hunt on their own… Excellent.”
“As expected, God had a plan all along.”
These “hunting snakes” were intelligent and obeyed commands perfectly. True to its legendary status, the species began reproducing at a ferocious pace the moment it was created. Within weeks, the gumtoad infestation had been reduced by ten percent.
Within a few months, the invasive species Biin had planted would likely be driven to extinction by these super-snakes. Biin was not slow enough to miss the shift.
Therefore, at this delicate moment—when the gumtoad pollution continued at a manageable level, enemy civilian stress had peaked and was now beginning to decline—he deployed his monsters.
Thanks to the amphibians spread throughout the enemy world, he already understood its structure perfectly.
Biin first sent Dark Lim and Sugar Lumps onto land. In the sky, he unleashed flocks of Gamchi and Bisyakheet. They bombed the enemy’s supposedly impregnable realm from above while Creamland began encroaching on the jungle. The full-scale offensive of the Dessert Legion had begun.
He had calculated that a mentally shattered population would be thrown into maximum chaos once the monsters rampaged among them. Unfortunately, this time Biin’s prediction was wrong.
Rather than falling into panic, Mitomok’s people became furious.
“Kill them! Kill every last one of those bastards!”
“Kill that demon monkey! A siege slingshot should take it down!”
“Slow-looking ape? Kill it! Huge black monster? Kill it! Kill everything! Don’t leave a single seed of any creature we’ve never seen alive!”
The strategy of “If I slap them, they’ll cower and cry” would not work forever. That had been a miscalculation.
Mitomok’s people resembled their god. They were fundamentally kind and friendly. They could bend for the sake of profit. But they possessed unbreakable spirit.
When bullied, they did not sink into depression and choose suicide. They relieved their rage by secretly sniping the main culprit with a slingshot.
Biin’s strategy had succeeded in one respect. The gumtoads had indeed inflicted insane levels of stress.
Yet instead of collapsing beneath that stress, the people channeled it into action. They united in burning hatred toward the enemy god.
“Who is the one destroying our lives!”
“Demon King Biin!”
“Exactly! The Demon King’s name is Biin! Are we supposed to simply endure this? Must we keep suffering these filthy tricks?!”
“No! Absolutely not!”
“Gather the army! Give every child a slingshot! This collision will decide the fate of our world! Let us completely annihilate that Demon King who views us as nothing but prey!”
“Waaaaaaaaah!”
When a narrative-grade leader incited them with such passion, the citizens responded with overwhelming fervor.
The nation’s systems snapped into perfect order. The army, which had grown somewhat lax, trained their marksmanship while remembering the gumtoad nightmare. They also prepared for close-quarters combat as a precaution. Mystery users pushed their abilities to the absolute limit.
Even non-combatants had work to do. Farmers took up slingshots to defend their crops from raiding Gamchi. It wasn’t just one farmer—his wife, children, and grandchildren all carried slingshots. Whenever an unseen creature appeared, they unleashed a hail of stones, ensuring not even a single fruit could be stolen.
What about combat stress? This civilization was deeply cultural. They had countless ways to relieve tension—alcohol, tobacco, spices, music, and more.
The Elguano Biin had encountered early on had built a culture-based civilization but eventually declined under relentless assault. Ogolraeot’s civilization had not been particularly cultural. While overwhelming stress could crush culture before it had time to be enjoyed, moderate stress actually granted resistance and united the people.
The military potential that had always simmered beneath the surface now exploded. No matter how many dimensional gates Biin opened or how many creatures he poured through, the defenders ground them all to paste within three days.
Some units even crossed the gates themselves. They slaughtered every living thing in sight, established a forward camp deep in the jungle region of the Dessert Desert, and began expanding their foothold.
From Biin’s perspective, the situation was genuinely bewildering.
“Wow… His internal administration definitely seems lacking, but his skill at counterattacking and his sheer spirit are even greater than Ogolraeot’s, who was mythic-grade?”
As expected, this game was never going to be easy. Biin had steeled himself to lose at least one legendary creation in this match.